The Who

I am @bsdpunk and I think I am good at things, particularly interviews and linux. I fancy myself a pretty good interviewer. I’m a goofball…like cringe worthy goofy. I usually use this to my advantage in an interview. I do my goofy laugh, at the start and when I get something wrong, I say some weird dad joke or something, and then I’m determined non-threatening, which I am. But I’m also quite knowledgable, and can usually find a few things in the interview I know more about in the interim, and the lovable goofball wins everybody over. Werner Hertzog, was not having it.

With Who

A big company, you know them. No for real…you know them.

For

An SRE (Site Reliabily Engineer / Linux ) role.

The How

Questions

You may or may not know this, but it’s taboo to share interview questions. And I’m not, but not because of that. This interview had very few actual questions. It was more like how does this part of linux work. Keep going. No…Keep going.

The Experience

So I called into my conference call, and when the person answered…it was Werner Hertzog. I could tell, because of the voice. “Is it safe to say all of your experience is support”, I said “No sir”, Werner Hertzog informed me, that Werener Hertzog was not a sir. It was unclear whether like so many men, Werner was uncomfortable with being called sir, or if Werner was a lady. I managed to only call Werner sir, one more time. It was trying, I was raised in a strict southern household…all authority figures were sir. Sorry, Werner. The tone was dark before, the possible gender mistake. It only got darker with each and every section of the interview.

Booting and Device Files

I think we started on “Explain the Linux Boot Process”, but like I was saying this was pretty fluid, the questions weren’t so direct it was more like explain this thing, and then the questions would focus on things that were ambigous or I left unexplained, but somehow device files came up here, I guess they’re kind of weird, and don’t really fit into the part where you talk about file systems. So I thought, this where I’ll top Lady Hertzog, I’ll drop mknod, and then Hertzey will know, I am strong in the ways of the linux fu. So I expelled all I knew about device files including dropping hints to executables like cu, and mknod. Like I got this, I’m the man. Not everyone deals with this stuff every day. The goofy love will grow. So after name dropping, Wernzy asks me for the exact flags and arguements I need to make a device file with mknod. Not cool bro. I don’t know. It was at this point I realized, non-threatening goofball, might not work…but I doubled down. And so did the gravely voice. And so did the darkness overtaking me.

DNS

“How well do you know DNS?”, “There is not a right way to answer that question”. We hit the main players, nsswitch.conf, hosts, and resolv.conf. Cacheing then, hosts, then local DNS, then the root server for the TLD. We talked of records, and their meanings. We talked of Carpenters and Walruses. But by the end I was eaten.

Databases

` “How well do you know Databases?”, I laughed. Just giggled like a silly person. “I take it you know them well”, “quite the opposite I mumbled.” I had been burnt earlier in the week on database questions. But this sort of playful banter made me triple down on my goofball strategy. I can feel you pulling back from me, but goddamn it, when all you are is a nail, everything’s a hammer. I talked about clusters, and replication but I was not as knowledgable as the tongue mislead, and the darkness enclosed over the rest of my head.

DevOps

The subject of devOps tools came up. I told Hertzamillion, I wrote one so I didn’t know any puppet, chef or ansible. Yeah I know that’s a shit answer, fuck you too. I get it though I need to know one. See below on my plan of action. Wernz0r explained to me that in the future if you don’t know one, you can’t get a job. Thanks, I got it, I’m on it. Quit it. SEE BELOW. I’M NOT DUMB YOU GUYS.

File Permissions

Seriously, they came up at this point in the interview. I nailed all this shit except for one thing which I was super confident and the only part I was arrogant about. “When can’t you write to a file even if the permissions are 755”, “SELINUX AND APP ARMOUR BITCH”…the bitch wasn’t there it was implied. I wouldn’t want to hurt Ms. Hertzog’s feelings.

Networking

I fucked up the tcp handshake y’all. I can say y’all, I’m drunk writing this and I’m from the south. Dirty Dirty, y’all. Also, I want to mention, I was East Coast and the only available West Coast interview was after hours their time, so it was like late as shit at night. But you know what I got right, amount of hosts on /22 subnet. I did math…after drinking time in the South. 1022 Y’ALL.

The Conclusion

Mr. Lady W.H. left me with this parting comment “I had fun talking to you”, I really wanted to say “I’m glad someone did”, but I opted for “I’m glad you did.” The best interviews are the ones where you learn more than you should have.

That’s a lie, that’s totally a lie.

The Who Again

I am @bsdpunk and my resume is written in LaTeX. I really got to pick up a devOps tool like Ansible, so I picked up this .